Are You Ready When the Call Comes?

When a disaster hits, engineers are among the first people communities turn to. After a hurricane, earthquake, flood, or collapse, owners want to know if their building is safe to enter. Public officials need technical judgment. Emergency managers need answers. And the community needs to get back to normal as quickly as possible.

That instinct to help is core to the profession. The commitment to public health, safety, and welfare is not just language in a code of ethics; it is the reason most structural engineers chose this work in the first place. When disaster strikes, engineers show up. That is not going to change, and it should not.

But disaster response is not routine project work. And the gap between wanting to help and being prepared to do it responsibly is wider than most firms realize until they are already in the field, with an adjuster on one side, a building official on the other, and a contractor asking for a written conclusion before the end of the day.

The firms that navigate that moment well share a common trait. They did not figure it out on the fly. They had already asked the hard questions, sorted out the insurance coverage, put the right agreements in place, and established who had authority to accept an assignment before the phone ever rang. That preparation is not complicated. It is just easy to put off until it is too late.

One of the most important things to understand about disaster response is that it covers a wide range of services, and the differences between them carry real consequences. A rapid visual assessment is not the same as a full structural evaluation. Documenting existing conditions is not the same as making repair recommendations. Responding through an organized emergency management program is not the same as showing up independently at a private owner’s request.

Those distinctions matter because the professional responsibilities, legal exposure, and insurance implications can vary significantly depending on what you are doing and for whom. Engineers who treat all disaster-response work as essentially the same tend to be the ones who end up in difficult positions later.

Disaster environments also move fast, and scope has a way of expanding without anyone formally agreeing to it. An engineer arrives to do a quick walkthrough and leaves having fielded questions from an insurance adjuster, a general contractor, and a building official, all of whom want something in writing. If the scope was not clearly defined before that conversation started, it is very hard to walk it back afterward.

If the work is limited, the documentation needs to say so. If a full evaluation has not been performed, nothing in writing should imply that it has. If additional investigation is needed before conclusions can be drawn, that needs to be stated plainly, not footnoted.

Most engineers have heard of Good Samaritan laws. Most assume those laws protect them when they respond to a disaster. That assumption is not always right.

Good Samaritan statutes are designed to encourage qualified professionals to assist in emergencies without fear of litigation. That is a reasonable and important policy goal. But these statutes are not uniform across states, they are not automatic, and they do not cover every type of disaster-response activity.

Whether protection applies in a given situation, and on what factors, is more complicated than most engineers expect, and varies significantly by state. The session addresses those variables directly.

The bottom line: find out what the law says in the state where you are working before you go, not after.

Professional liability coverage does not extend automatically to every disaster-response scenario, and the details matter. The specifics of how coverage applies, and where the gaps are, depend on the particulars of the assignment. Those are among the questions the session is designed to help firms think through in advance.

Other coverages can come into play depending on the assignment and the conditions on the ground: general liability, workers’ compensation, automobile, umbrella. Post-disaster sites are not routine work environments, and field safety needs to be part of the planning conversation, not an afterthought.

None of these are difficult questions to answer. But they have to be asked before the deployment, not after. Firms that expect their engineers to participate in disaster response should be sitting down with their insurance advisor and legal counsel in advance, reviewing their policies, and getting clear answers about what is and is not covered under different scenarios.

Even when individual engineers are well prepared, firms can still create unnecessary exposure by not having clear internal processes in place. Who has authority to accept a disaster-response assignment? Which engineers are qualified and trained to perform the work? How will field documentation be reviewed before it goes out? What approvals are required before an engineer deploys?

On-call agreements and master service agreements can resolve a significant amount of ambiguity before disaster strikes. Getting scope, compensation, indemnity, and limits of service established in writing before you need them is far easier than trying to negotiate those terms in the middle of a response when time pressure is high and everyone wants answers immediately.
A clear internal process is not about slowing things down. It is about making sure engineers can move quickly and confidently when the call comes, without making rushed decisions that create exposure for themselves, their firms, or the communities they are trying to help.

These are exactly the issues at the center of the upcoming CASE session, Natural Disasters and Good Samaritan Protection, part of the SEI, NCSEA, and CASE Summer Series on Tuesday, July 28, from 1:00 to 2:00 PM ET.

The session is presented by Leo Argiris, PE, Executive Managing Principal of Greyling Insurance Brokerage, and Roger Guilian, JD, CRIS, Senior Vice President at Greyling. Between them they bring decades of direct experience working with engineering firms on risk management, insurance, litigation, and disaster response. They will cover the current landscape of Good Samaritan protection across the country, the insurance questions firms most commonly get wrong, and the contracts and internal processes that make the difference between a well-managed response and an expensive one.

If your firm does disaster-response work, or expects to, this session is worth an hour of your time before you need it.■